Climategate

[steelish]

Syun-Ichi Akasofu - a geophysicist, NOT a climatologist.
Tim Ball - head of another group which won't reveal its funding sources.
Ian Clark - another non-climatologist.
Piers Corbyn - a weatherman! And an astrophysicist. NOT a climatologist.

You're right....an astrophysicist and a geophysicist are both numbskulls and don't know of what they speak. Climatology is a "generated" field of study that is fairly new...but then, geophysicists and astrophysicists are morons and know nothing of the planet.

I'm sorry, but I couldn't help but be dry and sarcastic in this post. To dismiss long standing fields of study in favor of a new field which supports a viewpoint you're in favor of is to me the same as refusing to see the forest for the trees.

[Thorne]

You're right....an astrophysicist and a geophysicist are both numbskulls and don't know of what they speak. Climatology is a "generated" field of study that is fairly new...but then, geophysicists and astrophysicists are morons and know nothing of the planet.

I never said any of them were morons. Just that their fields of expertise did not necessarily qualify them to be considered experts in climatology. Dentists study medicine but it's unlikely you would want one to do heart surgery on you. Architects design entire buildings, but could you trust one to weld the steel together? Certainly an architect could learn to weld, or a dentist could learn surgery. But then they would have the credentials for those things and would display them, proudly. If these scientists have the proper credentials, why don't they proclaim them? If they don't have those credentials then, while they may be experts in their fields, they aren't necessarily experts in other fields.

I'm sorry, but I couldn't help but be dry and sarcastic in this post. To dismiss long standing fields of study in favor of a new field which supports a viewpoint you're in favor of is to me the same as refusing to see the forest for the trees.

I've been known to get a little(!) sarcastic on occasion, so no need to apologize. And I'm not dismissing any fields of study. What I'm doing is comparing the claims of one study with the claims of another. In a field like this, especially, where the amount of reproducible laboratory work is minor and the major part of claims comes from field study and interpretation of data, you have to balance those interpretations and come to a decision about which you think might be correct.

My training, and my predisposition, is to trust the chemist with chemical matters, the physicist with physics matters and the climatologist with climate matters. When thousands of climate experts show their data, explain their results, and come to similar conclusions, I have to place their findings ahead of an expert in another field who comes to a different conclusion. Especially if that other expert may be financed by an industry which has a high financial interest in NOT promoting global warming.

Believe me, steelish, I'm not trying to cling to unfounded beliefs. I started out not believing in AGW, or in global warming at all. Learning new things over the past 10-15 years has led me to the conclusion that global warming is, indeed, occurring. Currently I am tending towards the side of AGW, but I'm not yet convinced that mankind has precipitated this change. However, I am convinced that we have, and are, contributing to it. I believe that there is much that can be done to minimize mankind's impact, such as regulating emissions from industries which produce high levels of greenhouse gases, but throwing money willy-nilly into schemes of carbon-sequestration and carbon credits and all that other political mumbo-jumbo is just crap that we have to fight against. It's like the swindlers ca. 1900 who were selling comet masks to protect people when the Earth passed through the tail of Haley's comet. (Yeah, look it up! It happened!)

So, when someone says to me, "Look at all this stuff from scientists who say there is no global warming! How can you still believe?", my response has to be, "Look at all this stuff from real climate experts! How can you not believe!"

[SadisticNature]

You're right....an astrophysicist and a geophysicist are both numbskulls and don't know of what they speak. Climatology is a "generated" field of study that is fairly new...but then, geophysicists and astrophysicists are morons and know nothing of the planet.

I'm sorry, but I couldn't help but be dry and sarcastic in this post. To dismiss long standing fields of study in favor of a new field which supports a viewpoint you're in favor of is to me the same as refusing to see the forest for the trees.

Climatology is basically a renaming of what used to be Atmospheric Physics, a field that has reputable journals that have been publishing since at least the 1970's.

Geophysics is not Atmospheric physics, and Astrophysics is basically an irrelevant field when considering things that are happening in the atmosphere of the planet we are on.

It's not a matter of smart vs not. No one is saying astrophysicists are stupid. But studying the Earth from the ground downwards or space from above atmosphere to the outer reaches of the universe doesn't qualify one as an expert in discussions on what is going on in the Earth's Atmosphere (namely part of the area located between what those two disciplines study).

[lucy]

Geophysics is not Atmospheric physics, and Astrophysics is basically an irrelevant field when considering things that are happening in the atmosphere of the planet we are on.

Apparently not. Saw a feature recently where an astrophysicist postulated that the long time variations of the earth's temperature correspond pretty neatly with the amount of some sort of radiation that hits the earth while we travel through space. Unfortunately i don't remember the details exactly but it made quite sense and certainly shows that the earth's climate is much more complex and depending on many more factors than we used to think.

He also said that this doesn't explain short time rises and falls of the earths temperature.

[steelish]

Climatology is basically a renaming of what used to be Atmospheric Physics, a field that has reputable journals that have been publishing since at least the 1970's.

Climatologists created their own journal: Climatic Change and it came out in 1977. But unlike many new journals, this one did not in fact launch itself as the flagship of a new discipline. Its explicit policy was to publish papers that were mainly interdisciplinary, such as explorations of the consequences that global warming might have on ecosystems. Most scientific papers on climate change itself continued to be published in journals dedicated to a specific field, like the meteorologists' Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences or the paleontologists' Quaternary Research.

On the whole, climate science remained "a scientific backwater," as one of its leading figures recalled decades later. "There is little question," he claimed, "that the best science students traditionally went into physics, math and, more recently, computer science." (Richard Lindzen, Testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, May 2, 2001, available as appendix to United States Congress (107:1) (2001)) The study of climate was not a field where you could win a Nobel Prize or a million-dollar patent. You were not likely to win great public fame, nor great respect from scientists in fields where discoveries were more fundamental and more certain. In the mid 1970s, it would have been hard to find a hundred scientists with high ability and consistent dedication to solving the puzzles of climate change. Now as before, many of the most important new findings on climate come from people whose main work lay in other fields, from air pollution to space science, as temporary detours from their main concerns.